West End Girls - Jenny Colgan Page 0,1

half of the bill.”

Lizzie flinched. This was not something, she knew from previous vicarious evenings, that could be tolerated. Although Penny’s minimum-wage waitress job was supposedly supplemented by tips, in reality her attitude, and the fact that a lot of men tried to ask her out, failed, and got aggressive, made the tip-giving side of things fairly erratic.

“Oh, my God! What did you do?”

Penny glanced in the mirror above the cheap dresser crammed in the corner of the tiny room. Despite the hour, Lizzie noticed, she still looked wonderful—her makeup had dribbled down under her eyes, but she looked sexy and a bit dangerous, not like Lizzie would: fat and a bit dirty.

“Legged it out the bathroom window.”

“You didn’t.”

“No, of course I didn’t, you idiot.” She paused. “I told him I’d forgotten my purse.”

“That’s all right then.”

“I’d have legged it out the bathroom window next though.”

Penny rubbed her pretty face blearily. “Anyway it went a bit downhill after that.”

Lizzie tried to smile sympathetically—she was going to have to listen anyway—but this wasn’t exactly the first time she’d been woken up in the early hours. Penny was a cad magnet, but, as she pointed out (none too kindly), she was the only one with a hope in hell of getting them out of this shithole.

“Go to bed,” said Lizzie.

“I mean, I didn’t know the bloody brandy was a hundred quid a glass, did I?”

“No,” said Lizzie calmly.

“I’m not the one saying, ‘Hey, how’s about a brandy?’ while eyeing up my fishnets.” She glanced down. There was a huge ladder up the left leg. “Shit. Shit, shit, shit.”

“Say it’s punk.”

“‘How’s about a brandy? Chilled? You know, my ex-wife was really chilly in bed. Makes a man feel, you know . . . so lonely.’”

“Lonely and poor.”

“Poor my arse,” said Penny dramatically. “My three ninety-nine ripped tights cause me a lot more pain than spending bloody six hundred pounds on bloody brandy does him.”

“Six hundred pounds,” said Lizzie. How on earth could people do something like that? Lizzie lived as she ate: hand to mouth.

“Should have read the menu, the dick, instead of yelping ‘Two glasses of your finest brandy’ over and over again. No wonder the waiter was smiling.”

“Did he tip?”

“Did he fuck. They were still screaming at each other when I ran out of the door.”

“Finish the water,” said Lizzie. It might not get Penny to work on time, but it might get her to work.

Penny took a long slug. “Ah,” she said. “Like finest brandy on my lips.”

“You’re a bad, bad girl,” said Lizzie. “Go to bed or I’m telling Mum.”

Six hundred pounds kept running through Lizzie’s head the next morning as she made her way to the bus stop. Six hundred pounds. That was unbelievable. Who could, did, spend money like that? Even by accident. Penny was still in bed; she didn’t start her job, as Brandford’s most glamorous and also grumpiest waitress, until later.

Nonidentical twins can have a head start on the knowledge, usually learned by children through a procession of tedious and time-consuming upsets, that life isn’t always fair.

“Twins? Really?”

That was one of Lizzie’s earliest memories; people disbelieving their mother as to their provenance. Along with, “Look at the size of you!” and, Lizzie’s personal favorite, “So, is Lizzie terribly clever, then?”

Being dressed alike only made matters worse, so they both started having tantrums about it from as early an age as possible. After all, it wasn’t Lizzie’s fault that she stayed short and plump while Penny shot up. It might have been her fault that while Penny made sure her dolls were immaculately dressed for their tea party, Lizzie scoffed all the scones. And while Penny smiled politely and learned to simper at adults from an early age, in case they had a spare pound coin in their pockets, Lizzie preferred to stay in the background before anyone had the chance to say, “Good eater, are we?”

“They’re so different, aren’t they?” their mother’s friends would say, smiling meanly in a very unconvincing fashion.

“Out! Out! Out!” Lizzie would say to herself quietly in the kitchen. “Goodbye, visitors, time to go!” And once they’d gone, her mum would come in and give her a special hug and a biscuit, just for her plain little daughter.

And here the twins still were, twenty-seven years old and in the same tiny council house in Parkend Close, Brandford. Lizzie sometimes felt as if there should be a bus to take them off to real life, but if there ever was she knew